An unorthodox detective novel about Waitrose-country paedos

W.H. Auden was addicted to detective fiction. In his 1948 essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, he analysed the craving, which he claimed was similar to an addiction to tobacco or alcohol. He suggested among other things that the genre allows the addict to indulge in a fantasy in which our guilt is purged, and we are restored to a state of innocence, to the Garden of Eden.

When literary novelists turn to crime fiction (as they so often do these days), the results are not always happy. Susan Hill is a welcome exception. Her Simon Serrailler novels have developed into a series whose appeal stretches beyond its genre.

Why? Perhaps Auden gives us a clue. At the heart of the Serrailler novels is a very English form of the Garden of Eden —Lafferton, a cathedral city somewhere in the south of England, deep in Waitrose country. It’s a world that many people would like to live in.

At first sight, Detective Chief Super-intendent Serrailler has his feet (probably wearing handmade shoes) planted in the past. He moves among the upper-middle classes as one of their own, and is fatally attractive to the opposite sex. Like Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, he went to Balliol. Serrailler is a distinguished artist in his spare time, just as P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh is a distinguished poet in his.

So far, so traditional. But there is nothing old-fashioned about the crimes that Serrailler investigates, and nothing at all cosy about the lives of the characters, including Serrailler’s. Nor does the format of the novels have much to do with the standard whodunnit that delighted Auden. Serrailler’s own relationships lie at the heart of the stories — notably with his widowed sister and his chilly father, both doctors, but also with lovers, colleagues and friends.